Rick Skwiot is the author of the new novel The Bootlegger's Bride. His other books include the novel Death in Mexico. He is also a journalist and a professor.
Q: What inspired you to write The Bootlegger’s Bride, and how did you create your characters Hazel and A.J.?
A: As a child I was fascinated by my parents’ tales of Prohibition, the Great Depression, and beyond: my father witnessing his neighbor gunned down in a gangland killing; my immigrant grandfather storing kegs of illegal whiskey in their flat (until my grandmother, fearful of deportation, began sleeping on the sofa); my mother helping downstairs neighbors label bathtub-gin bottles. By writing The Bootlegger’s Bride I got to recreate and occupy that world with them for a while.
As to how does a writer create characters, who knows? A messy and mysterious process, as with any birth. They often are composites of people (real or otherwise) you have known, made flesh by your giving them words and actions. Further, characters are products of their environment (e.g., Hamlet, Huck Finn, et al).
My title character Hazel Robinson is a dreamy, bookish woman stuck in a factory town and thus given to romance and fantasy, which ultimately fuels her self-destruction. Her son A.J. relishes the rural paradise where he was raised, an Eden from which he is banished emotionally when orphaned. I needed to inhabit their hearts and minds in my imagination to bring them to life.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Newspaper archives were a main source, allowing me to get the weather, headlines, fashions, prices, restaurant menus, and ball game scores right. Online info from libraries, historical societies, and other institutions figured in as well. I also drew heavily on family lore, such as my father’s Depression-era tales of the nation’s largest Hooverville on the St. Louis waterfront.
One thing that surprised me came as I researched orphans and discovered that so many noted individuals, both real and fictional, were orphans—Moses, Caesar, Cleopatra, Aristotle, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Madame Curie; Tom Jones, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Huck Finn, Superman, and Tarzan.
Another surprise came when I attempted to revisit the near northside St. Louis neighborhood of my childhood and discovered it no longer exists. So many of the pre-Civil War redbrick tenements and businesses have been abandoned, collapsed, or demolished, leaving a largely unrecognizable urban prairie that I had trouble navigating. Very melancholy.
Q: The author Kelly Daniels said of the book, “Skwiot delivers the grit and beauty of a Midwest gone by, back when life was harder than it is today, but also more honest...” What do you think of that description?
A: Yes, to the grit and beauty.
And yes, to life being physically harder then, both at the factory and at home, where one often hauled coal for the stove, did laundry by hand, and more.
And more honest because our interactions then were more personal, often face-to-face, less distant and/or anonymous than are many today. Meaning there was more personal accountability, thus more honesty. Further, folk culture still ruled many communities, even in large urban areas, before the growth of depersonalizing mass culture after World War II.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Expanded empathy for working-class and immigrant Americans struggling to find a place for themselves in the hardscrabble 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, sharing in the emotion of that lived experience by engaging with this work of historical fiction.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Two novels, both about tennis pros and set in Florida but dramatically different from one another.
The first, provisionally titled “Where Love Means Nothing,” is a darkly humorous cozy mystery about a publicly beloved but privately loathed Key West tennis instructor who is garroted in his pro shop with racquet string.
The second, “This One Beautiful Thing,” depicts the born-again love match between a tour tennis pro crippled by a carjacker’s bullet and the woman that he lost because of it 20 years earlier, now the wife of the Miami mayor’s fixer.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: You can find my blog and links to my published works at www.RickSkwiot.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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